Woods
Ange-Aimée Woods, a Canadian journalist who played a key role in the recent expansion of Colorado Public Radio arts coverage, died July 2 in Montreal of apparent heart failure. She was 41.
Woods joined CPR in October 2013 as the Denver station’s first full-time arts reporter. She’d spent the previous decade with CBC’s Radio One, working a variety of jobs including as a senior producer on the live drivetime program Homerun and a social media producer.
During her seven months at CPR, she worked on launch of its weekly arts program Colorado Art Report. “What really impressed me with her was not only her tremendous chops as a journalist, but also her clear passion for the arts in the very broadest way,” said Chloe Veltman, CPR Arts Editor, who hired Woods as a part of CPR’s grant-funded effort to launch an arts bureau. “She was very agnostic in terms of something going on: a sculpture of Christ in a small town in very rural parts of Colorado, and also what was going on with the hip-hop scene in Denver.”
Woods resigned from CPR in April due to health-related reasons and moved back to Montreal. A week before her death, she had been emailing with Veltman and sounded upbeat, Veltman said.
“What attracted me most to journalism is the power the media has to help people make responsible and informed choices,” Woods wrote in her CPR producer’s bio. “Good journalists monitor everything around them; they ask the difficult questions and push for answers.”
Woods was also a film producer, and worked on Canadian productions including 2006’s Bon Cop Bad Cop, one of the highest-grossing films in Canadian history.
“Our whole organization’s been reeling ever since we found out,” Veltman said. “We miss her very much. She had an incredible smile and enthusiasm and a lust for life.”